This invention relates to a surgical drainage system and more particularly to a device designed to facilitate controlled removal of blood and recirculation of the patient's own blood if desired.
Surgeons go to great lengths to try to minimize the amount of blood loss during an operation on the heart, lungs, or internal aortic system since they must replace the patient's own blood with donored blood. Recent advances in technology and medicine have provided the ability to collect and recycle the patient's own previously lost blood (autotransfusion).
There are obvious advantages to the patient in autotransfusion; however, the apparatus and collection means are both complicated and expensive.
First, the level of suction must be controlled since excessive levels of suction tend to damage the blood cell structure. Next the blood must be collected in a rigid reservoir and then pumped into a blood bag for another transferal to a blood processor. From the processor the purified blood is then placed in a blood bag and reinfused intravenously into the patient.
After surgery, especially open heart surgery, there is continued leakage of blood into the pericardial space from sutured blood vessels, etc. Typically, surgeons place a large bore drain in the lower portion of the pericardial space and drain the blood into a collection bottle. Such post operatively collected blood can amount to anywhere between several hundred cubic centimeters to up to two liters. There is no present means for salvaging this blood such that it could also be recycled since post operative blood loss must also be replaced.
One of the main reasons for autotransfusing the patient's own blood is to eliminate the possibility of hepatitis infection from donored blood in a critical operation such as heart surgery. If donored blood must be used post operatively then the original surgical autotransfusion advantages are compromised and the patient is then subjected to undue risk and the potential for complications.